Monday, 23 May 2016

Practice, practice, practice

Due to my (over-)sharing of yoga poses on Instagram and Facebook, I'm becoming known as the yoga girl in my little world. It's a title I'm proud of. While I haven't yet achieved the zen-like state of mind I'm waiting for, I do feel happier and more at peace since I started my practice last year, 450 days ago. If I estimate an average of half an hour of yoga/day, it's been over 200 hours of yoga. Kinda crazy!

People are telling me now how flexible I am. To that I have to say, bullshit! I was never a very flexible person. When I was 24 I did a fitness assessment at a gym (during the only time I ever joined a gym, which lasted for six months), and the main area I needed to work on was my flexibility. Or lack thereof. I remember I had to sit down, legs stretched out in front of me, and try to touch my toes (classic seated forward bend). I couldn't. My legs seemed endlessly long, the toes far off in the distance. I was convinced I would never be able to reach them.

Well, invest 200 hours in anything, and you will get better at it! Tenacity is the key. Not giving up. Falling and getting back up again. All that jazz that we tell our kids, and that we give high school graduates on the way to conquer the world, applies to us as well.

I'm planning on investing many more 200 hours into the practice and into myself, and surprise myself by what this body of mine is capable of.

It's been a while since I last did a progress report. I tried to find pictures from the first three months of my practice, and compare them to fairly recent ones. There are at least six months between all these poses, proving my favourite hashtag right: #practiceanditwillcome!

If you click on the links below the pictures, they will direct you to step-by-step directions of how to get into the poses.

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I'm Miriam, 38, a dog-loving, yoga-obsessed farm wife living in the 'wilderness' of Canada. After being vaguely dissatisfied with my life for years, I decided to hell with fear, and embarked upon a life realizing my dreams. My husband and I moved to a ranch in a small cowboy town where I work at the local hospital, I wrote a book (coming out soon!), and I'm happier than I have ever been. Since my husband's Lyme Disease diagnosis I'm passionate about educating people about this mysterious illness (read more here).I've been published by Thought Catalog and SheSavvy, write a Newsletter, and work on my second book. I've made it my mission to show others that we can all live our best lives!